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| Big Doug |
Until he fell to police bullets
on Thursday July 4, 2013, Douglas Akachukwu Ude was what you would call a Renaissance
man. He had wide ranging interests covering writing and painting, music and
other art forms. But this description does very little to capture the
effervescence of Douglas Ude.
I had no inkling what lay before
me when I walked into his office that balmy October evening, seven years ago. I
had gone through all the stages of the interview that took me to Fidelity Bank
and Douglas was the last man in a long hierarchy of officers who would decide
my suitability for the position or otherwise. He struck me as a fairly large
man with expansive ways and when his eyes lit up in response to my greeting, I
was immediately startled by what seemed like a large sluice of goodness in him
that I was certain would announce itself in time. I didn’t have long to wait to
know just how right I was.
When I finally resumed at the
Marketing Communications department of the bank, I met a team of bright young
men and a woman, who were not only brilliant on their jobs but had a remarkable
sense of humour. Among them were Kelechi Ogbamgba who often wore the inquisitorial
look of one who wished to ask life a few difficult questions, Kelechi Eulwa who
never seemed to run out of entrepreneurial ideas and Idris Salihu who combined
exquisite tastes perfectly with disarming gentility. There was also Ronke
Aina-Scott; the painter and visualizer - the only lady in the team and Rotimi
Mathews who in Doug’s words was the Asiwaju of visas, being the bank’s protocol
officer. In Emma Esinnah, our Group Head, we had an extremely wise and
brilliant man with as much charm as amazing self-discipline. Then, there was Douglas Ude. Big Doug! Douglas
was big; physically and mentally. He used both well. His enormous size always
arrested the attention of his environment while his impressive intellect burned
deep impressions of his whirlwind personality on people who encountered him. He
was humorous in a way that, perhaps only he could possibly be. We had an
exciting team. Everyone had something to drop on the table, as it were.
I met a crop of excellent talents
in the team; people who were accommodating, loving and supportive. It took me
no time at all to come into the team’s heritage of humour. The team worked hard
and played hard. We never lacked laughter at any moment in time. Between Emma
and Doug, we had an amazing fountain of humour from where laughter sprouted
without ceasing. Big Doug could tell a story with a perfect mimicry of the
voices of all the characters in the tale and leave his audience bending over
with laughter. No one was ever sufficiently prepared for his jokes. It always
took you by surprise. You could tell that it was Friday when the door to the
office swung open and the first thing to hit you was the metallic blast of the
instrumental version of Bruce Hornsby’s’ That’s
Just the Way it is; a song that the rapper 2Pac pressed his enormous genius
upon to squeeze out the massive hip-hop hit of the same title. Doug was always in the office before anyone
else and more often than not, he was already perched behind his desk at 6
o’clock in the morning playing classic songs. Most days though, you would step
into the office to the clicking sound of his keyboard as he hammered out mails
after mails. A lot of times, these mails flooded our mailboxes before breakfast
was over. He had so much passion for his work; so many ideas to share on almost
anything; from the latest marketing strategies to the foundational theories in
communication to football and boxing history. It was evident that he was the
living spring of the team, although much of what we had then trickled down from
the sagely leadership provided by the Managing Director and Chief executive
Officer of the bank, Reginald Ihejiahi. Often referred to as the “intellectual
in the banking hall,” Ihejiahi had largely succeeded in creating an atmosphere
that made knowledge something to covet and display in Fidelity Bank. Through
the bank’s weekly lecture series and the numerous offshore training
opportunities for staff as well as the sponsorship of the famous international
creative writing workshop series, the employees were drip-fed the notion that
knowledge was a beautiful bride worth wooing and possessing. It was this
atmosphere that fuelled the flowering of ideas and expressions that were to
later coalesce into the larger culture that has become the distinguishing
feature of the bank. Even so, there was something unusual about the marketing
communications team of that period; something that felt like an extra-ordinary
kindred spirit or something close to it. And looking back now through the misty
layers of time, it all seems incredible how fate had melded that team together,
almost on a whim.
It has to be said of Douglas Ude
that his peculiar charisma was essentially transcendental. It had this
remarkable quality of exulting in itself and feeding on its own strength. If
you saw him sweeping along the corridor like a cyclone, flashing a sparkling
and almost ethereal smile at everyone, including drivers and cleaners, you
would almost conclude that he belonged with the downtrodden. His humane touch
was such that his act of kindness to the driver of our pool-car at the time,
Johnson Otti, moved the fellow to name his son Douglas. Yet, Doug was so
intellectually deep that he fittingly belonged with the best in the business of
introspection. I had often heckled him to put down his thoughts in a more
permanent form as his writings were so provocatively rich and engaging that I
often wondered if he wouldn’t have been more useful to humanity outside the
banking hall.
I was to encounter his deep intellectual side fully when
he joined Revolution Now, a
Blackberry Messenger group of some feisty and engaging Nigerian professionals
at home and in the Diaspora to which I and a couple of friends belong. Doug’s
entry into the group brought a new scholarly steam to our conversations as he
infused his comments with zany humour that had everyone reeling with laughter
while absorbing some new paradigms. He wrote in the manner he spoke, clipped and
cadenced and striking. In the opening paragraph of his tribute to Aluu Four, Doug wrote - “Who would have
thought it, that deep within the serene green canopied woods that blanket the
Choba campus of UNIPORT; such a macabre, grisly ritual would unravel before us;
that in an ivory tower of learning, we would find the heart of darkness.” Indeed Doug loved words and knew just what to
do with them. If there was a new word in town, you were most likely to hear it
first from Douglas Ude. There were times, though, when his writing took a prescient tone; like
the piece he wrote on the intriguing resentment of his first son of the arrival
of his little brother – “Suddenly, there’s another guy in his woman’s life –
he’s no longer the only dog in the manger… How shaky the foundations ‘pon which
we build: - that there will be a tomorrow in which we remain relevant; that our
dreams will persist; that our loved ones
remain immune to sudden violence from a total stranger; that this flawed
entity called Nigeria will endure…? We will learn, as my son Ikem surely has, that in this life, even surrounded by love,
there are just no guarantees… “
I came across those haunting lines with a sense of foreboding. Was there a
split moment; a little crackle in eternity when Douglas Ude had a glimpse of
what lay ahead of him?
I am not one for superstition or premonition
but when I also listened to the officiating priest at Doug’s Service of Songs
the other night recall that he actually ran into the armed robbers in whose
hands he lost his life after making a wrong turn on the road that fateful
night, I felt something stir inside of me. Could it be fate? Somebody tell me
it is. That is the only way Doug’s mid-day exit would make sense to me.
But how did we lose a man like
Douglas Ude? Interestingly, there are two accounts of how it happened. One account
says that he took his wife, Chioma out on a movie date and was coming back in
the late night when he drove straight into the armed robbers at Jibowu, Lagos.
Another version of the story claims that he and his wife had gone to the
popular Jibowu bus station to pick up a visiting relative. Both accounts are
correct. A close source informed me that Doug and his wife had gone to pick up
a visiting relative at Jibowu. Halfway through the journey, the relative had
called to inform them that the arrival in Jibowu would be delayed by some hours
on account of a terrible traffic build up on the way. Consequently, since they
were already out of their home, Doug and Chioma decided to head to the cinemas and
spend those hours watching a movie. When the movie ended, they drove to Jibowu
not knowing that they had just had their last beautiful moment as a couple.
They met armed robbers on the way and were promptly taken hostage in their own
car by the robbers who went on an ill-fated shake-down of the city. It wasn’t
long before they ran into the police and Doug was hit in the ensuing crossfire
by three bullets that homed in on his abdomen and diaphragm. The robbers
escaped from the scene and dumped them on the way. Doug survived a surgery and
lived all of four days before he gave up the fight on the tarmac of the Murtala
Muhammed International Airport in Lagos when he was being wheeled into an air
ambulance to be flown overseas for a better medical attention. Some people have
argued that a man who took three bullets and hung on to life for four days
should not have died. That may be true; so long as we rule fate out of the
equation.
Until he drew his last breath, Douglas
Ude was one of those people whose mere appearance gave life a specter of
certainty; you felt justified to mock death by drawing strength from sheer
force of his presence. It was difficult to associate him with physical weakness
of any type. He was very hard to ignore. I remember how he stepped into the
closing ceremony of the 2008 edition of Fidelity’s International Creative
Writing Workshop and swiftly “kidnapped” the show. I was gradually bringing the
event to an end as the compere when I asked Doug to give a vote of thanks. He
stood on the stage and loomed over the audience like the statue of a Buddha
over a desolate landscape. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a high-pitched
voice, “you have done so well that I think you all deserve a locomotive clap.
This is how we shall do it. You watch me. If I raise my right hand, you clap.
If raise the left, you clap again. The more often I raise them, the more you
clap. Oya, let’s go!” With that he raised his hand once and the audience
responded with a thunderous clap. He raised the second and they responded. And
when he increased the speed with which he raised his hands, the regularity of
the clap produced a chugging rumble that sounded very much like an old
locomotive engine wheezing and puffing down a creaky old track. When he finally
raised his hand to bring the human locomotive to a halt, the hall erupted in
euphoria. While the crowd exited the hall, it was clear to all that Doug’s locomotive
clap would stand out in their memory of the evening.
Ironically too, when I looked at
the crowd that gathered at Doug’s wake the other night, I shook my head in
sudden realization that even in death, Douglas Ude had continued to draw people
to himself. For a flitting moment, I wondered what thunderous sound would arise
from the hall had the officiating priest suddenly stopped and asked the crowd
to do a locomotive clap for Big Doug. His painful exit has indeed made the
world a poorer place.
As I stretch my mind across the
years that I have known Douglas Ude, a central image dominates the universe of
my thoughts – the image of a shooting star, blazing across the evening sky,
releasing a burst of glorious sparkles that fade into the distance after their
job of lighting up the horizon is done. The remains of the Big Doug will be
interred tomorrow, July 26, 2013, in his home town of Mgbowo in Augwu, Enugu
State. Farewell Dude!
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